


Occupational Hazards

by universal_reno



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: ...sort of, Binge Drinking, Blood, Brawling, Drunken Shenanigans, Friendship, Gen, Odd missions, TF29 bonding time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 18:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8337433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/universal_reno/pseuds/universal_reno
Summary: Sometimes going undercover requires getting absolutely plastered. Fortunately MacReady is up to the job. And if he's not there's always Jensen to fall back on.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kameiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kameiko/gifts).



> Another one that I started awhile ago and just now got around to finishing. Started out with the idea of MacReady glassing someone for being racist to Jensen, because I’m convinced he’s both protective and a fighty drunk, and at some point combined with my friends' stories of business drinking in Russia to form the beast you see before you. Anyway, I really like Jensen and MacReady being bros. Not sure if I’ll ever get around to writing a threesome with them and Aria, but hope springs eternal.
> 
> For Kameiko, who inadvertently reminded me that I’d started this and is therefore the reason I finished it. Hope this makes your post-hurricane routine a bit more fun!

“As long as you keep drinking, he’ll keep talking. Apparently it’s a cultural thing.”

It was one of the more unusual mission briefings Miller had ever given. In an ideal world the assignment would’ve gone to Jensen. Whatever tech Sarif had loaded him up with made it virtually impossible for him to stay drunk for more than an hour at a time. Plus, while Miller couldn’t officially confirm it, word around the office was that the sudden and spectacularly bloody implosion of the Dvali hierarchy was his doing. The pragmatic part of him found this infuriating. They’d spent months investigating the Dvali and now they’d have to start over from square one with a whole new set of scumbags. Still, he couldn’t deny it was impressive. And what was the point of having a shadowy international taskforce if it didn’t pull off a spectacular hit or two occasionally?

Regardless of the culprit, the deaths of Radich and Otar had left a power vacuum in Prague’s underworld. Current odds favored the Russians to fill it, and TF29 had a brief window to infiltrate their local operations from the word go. Unfortunately the only member of the Russian gang’s hierarchy indiscreet enough to agree to a meeting with an alleged major player in the local arms market at this stage was also vehemently anti-Aug.

Fortunately the taskforce still possessed just the agent for the job in the form of Duncan MacReady. He and Miller had been friends since the war in Australia, and had spent many a now-unremembered weekend working toward the destruction of their livers at bars and sporting events across Europe. Since Black’s sudden and gruesome departure from TF29 (to say nothing of life itself) he’d also been temporarily put in charge of the organized crime division. Combined with his counterterrorism duties this made him among the most overworked men in Prague, and thoroughly deserving of a drink.

\---------------------------

This had to be one of the most pointless missions Jensen had ever been sent on. He’d been instructed to act as MacReady’s bodyguard, while MacReady himself filled the role of expat arms dealer extraordinaire. At first Jensen’s part had entailed standing in a corner looking menacing (a particular talent of his), while Mac and a heavily tattooed Russian with a unpleasant face attempted to drink each other into a coma. Unfortunately it now seemed set to evolve into actual chaperone duty.

Nearly ten minutes had passed since the Russian had lost their unspoken drinking contest and been carted away unconscious by his own bodyguard. The only intel he’d seen fit to divulge over the course of an hour and two bottles of vodka had been reported by other agents days ago, and it seemed unlikely he had anywhere near the level of influence he’d claimed in the first place. Big surprise there. Jensen was beginning to hate mob types in general, even when they weren’t threatening anyone he cared about.

To his credit MacReady seemed to be taking what was ultimately a massive waste of his time quite well. He finally made his way back over to Jensen after an unsuccessful bout of chatting up the bartender, grinning like a prize fighter who’d just won the title but taken a few too many blows to the head in the process. The change from his usual reserve and sarcasm was frankly kind of terrifying. He’d also apparently decided that cider was an ideal chaser for vodka, having reached the level of intoxication where one more would either make no perceptible difference in how rotten he felt tomorrow or kill him outright. 

“C’mon, let’s get you home before your Russian friend comes back for another round.” He grabbed a handful of MacReady’s coat and steered him toward the door.

“What? Now? Christ, Jensen, it’s only eleven. Would it kill you to live a bit?” 

“Quite possibly, if any Dvali stragglers catch us here and decide to try to avenge their bosses.”

Not that any member of the Dvali who’d seen him take out Otar and Radich had lived long enough to blow his cover. MacReady knew that, but was in no state to remember it at present. What he did remember as he was unceremoniously marched out of the Red Queen and into the chill of November in Prague was that he was starving and hadn’t had a proper curry since the mission in London.

“Food then. There’s a curry place a few blocks from the office.” He started off in the exact opposite direction to where he’d just described. Jensen followed, sullen but unwilling to face Miller’s wrath if his second in command turned up beaten to death in a gutter tomorrow. He suspected they had about as much chance of actually winding up at a curry place as he did of making it back to his apartment in time to do unspeakable things to Koller before the sun came up. He silently cursed Sarif for installing whatever genius contraption had doomed him to spend the rest of his life as the sober, responsible one on nights out.

\--------------------

As predicted they spent the next hour stumbling around in the dark without finding so much as a single naan, let alone a whole curry house. It was cold and it was Tuesday which meant the streets were largely empty.

“Maybe we could just go back to your place and order a pizza” Jensen suggested when it became clear that MacReady had lost all sense of a set destination and was now wandering at random.

MacReady scowled and flopped down on a nearby bench, dragging Jensen with him. He didn’t want to go home, damn it! Aria was on leave visiting family in America, and without her around his apartment was too quiet. Also, he wasn’t quite sure he remembered where his apartment was at the moment. It had receded into the drunken haze currently enveloping his brain along with the location of the curry place and the larger part of his sense of self respect.

“Y’know the problem with Prague?” he slurred, trying to maneuver himself under Jensen’s coat as much as possible without him noticing. When had it gotten so cold out, anyway? Jensen did notice, but had resigned himself too fully to the utter bullshit of the situation to care. “No kebab shops” he continued “not a single goddamn one. And now the curry place has gone too.”

Jensen was about to point out that the curry place was almost certainly either a figment of his imagination or exactly where he’d left it after his last drunken escapade with Miller, but the arrival of two burly locals distracted him. Great hulking bastards, each of them twice as ugly as their useless Russian informant and probably at least as drunk as MacReady. They stopped in front of the bench and glared down at them.

“Can’t you stupid clank faggots read?” the slightly smaller and uglier of the pair spat, gesturing toward the bench “Naturals only! Now fuck off before we make it so’s you can’t no more!”

Jensen sighed and rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. The insistence on separating everything out by augmented and non-augmented was seriously bullshit, but he wasn’t about to start a fight with a couple of thugs over politics when he had a drunk coworker in tow. Said drunk coworker, however, had other plans. He gripped Jensen’s shoulder hard enough to bruise had it not been more carbon fiber than flesh, effectively forcing him to stay in place.

“Look, _gentlemen_ ” MacReady snarled the word with such venom that Jensen knew this would end poorly. “First off, I’m not augmented. Second off, the only one who gets to fuck with this particular Aug” he poked Jensen in the chest harder than was at all necessary “Is me. Thirdly, if you knuckle-dragging cunts don’t get out of my sight within the next ten seconds I’ll personally see to it that you’re taken from your homes by men in black helicopters and delivered to the most vile detention facility in the northern hemisphere, where you’ll spend the rest of your miserable lives taking it up the ass from ARC militants who’ll like your attitude even less than I do!”

By the end of his speech he’d made it to his feet and was clutching the empty cider bottle in a white knuckled grip while doing his best to loom over the pair despite being slightly shorter than either of them. _He’s going to get us_ _shot_ flashed through Jensen’s mind just before he saw the bigger guy reach into his coat.

The next few seconds were a blur of lunging at their would-be murderer and smashing his face into the nearest wall. Jensen had just managed to snap his wrist and kick the dropped revolver down a convenient storm drain when he heard glass shattering behind him. He turned to find MacReady holding what was left of the bottle, several shards of which were now protruding from bloody gashes in the other thug’s scalp. Before he could react MacReady lunged at his opponent like a rabid dog, stabbing the jagged bottle neck into his eye and kicking him in the stomach before subjecting what was left of his face to a hail of punches as he sprawled unresponsive on the pavement.

“Shit! Mac, lay off him! You know how annoyed Miller gets when we kill the locals! It’s like three days’ worth of forms to sort out!”

For once MacReady showed no concern for the hassles of additional paperwork and continued to pummel the guy. Jensen managed to haul him off just as his fist met the thug’s remaining eye with a particularly sickening crunch that left the socket looking rather more concave than was healthy. He managed to keep his coworker’s arms pinned for the few seconds it took his brain to catch up to the reality of the fight being over, but only just. Drunken rage and years of military conditioning were a hell of a combination to contend with. Fortunately MacReady stopped struggling soon enough.

“You really need to mind your six. I’ve lost count of all the times I’ve had to cover your ass.” He looked from Jensen to the bloody mess of would-be assailant at their feet with a mix of sheepishness and drunken pride. “Too far, do you think?”

“Just a bit. Now let’s get out of here before the cops show up.”

\----------------------------

If anyone had asked Jensen in 2019 where he saw himself in ten years, ‘sneaking through back alleys in Prague to avoid racist police with a fellow Interpol agent who probably just committed murder while too drunk to find his way home’ would most certainly not have been his response. None the less, here he was. Or rather, here they were. MacReady’s dreams of curry and kebabs had been dashed when Jensen pickpocketed his phone and ascertained the location of ‘home’ from his GPS app. He should probably delete that. Not the smartest move for a spy. But it had served to get them to the door of his apartment right about the time he sobered up enough to realise with horrible clarity how drunk he still was.

“Don’t suppose you remember the door code.”

“Door code? Do you have any idea how easy it is to hack those things? I’ve got a chip.” MacReady smacked his hand against a sensor by the doorknob and hissed when it drove an unseen shard of glass deeper into one of the gashes in his palm. The bottle trick was not without its hazards. There was a faint beep and the door opened.

“Thought you said you weren’t augmented” Jensen teased.

“Not an augment. Just an ID chip. It’s different.” He sounded distant. Jensen looked back and saw that he was staring down at the blood on his hands as though he’d just noticed it. He was terribly pale. A moment later he pushed passed into the apartment and managed to make it to the sink just in time to be sick.

Jensen locked the door and set about poking through the rest of the apartment to give him a bit of privacy. Or maybe privacy wasn’t the right word for going through someone’s things, but the sentiment was there. He rummaged through the bathroom cupboards looking for a first aid kit and some painkillers. MacReady may not have been his favorite person, but he wasn’t about to let him spend the rest of the night bleeding and digging glass out of his hand when he couldn’t even see straight. He stayed put until he heard the kitchen tap turn off, occupying himself in the meantime by going through the rest of the drawers, discovering the contents of a moderately-sized sex shop in the process. Damn, and he’d thought Koller had a thing for toys. He really needed to introduce him to Aria.

“You alright?” he asked, returning to the kitchen with the necessary supplies. MacReady was leaning heavily on the counter, staring off into space. He certainly didn’t look alright.

“I’ll live.”

“Come on then, let’s get you patched up.” He helped him out of his coat and lead him over to the sofa. Under the brighter lights of the apartment the amount of blood on the rest of his clothes was almost alarming. The shirt came off next, and was unceremoniously dumped behind the sofa onto a pile of other laundry. The whole place was surprisingly untidy. Between MacReady and Aria he would’ve expected it to be as squared away as any barracks on the planet, but it was in much the same state as his own apartment, only with less cereal and more unpacking.

“I’ll file the mission reports tomorrow. And tell Miller you’ll be late getting in.”

MacReady nodded in acknowledgement but otherwise remained silent. He hardly flinched when Jensen poured disinfectant over his injured hand and set to work digging out the glass. Objectively he knew it should hurt like hell, but there was still enough vodka in his system to take the edge off and let him focus on other things. Unfortunately those things weren’t any more pleasant.

“I killed him.”

Jensen looked up from his attempt at gluing the worst of the gashes closed. It was better for preventing infection than stitches, but trying to apply it when the wound wouldn’t stop bleeding was a bit of a job.

“Maybe. But he looked like he had a pretty thick skull. And honestly I doubt it’d be any great loss to the world regardless." 

MacReady stared at him blankly for a moment before realizing they were talking about two different people.

“Not tonight. Though if I did him in so much the better. It’s fucked up, you know. What you have to deal with from assholes like that. People are scared after everything that’s happened. But that’s no excuse.”

Jensen shrugged and went back to his work. He wasn’t looking for apologies or explanations. But once again MacReady had other ideas.

“I was in Brisbane during the Incident. One of my mates from way back had gotten leave and come out for a visit. We went in together. Right out of secondary school. He got augmented after a run-in with an IED in Iraq.” He didn’t know why he was telling Jensen this, but he knew he’d gone too far to stop now. Damn Russian gangsters and their vodka binges right to hell! “When…whatever happened… happened he completely lost it. Was like he was back there all over again, fighting ISIS. But it was just a couple of my guys who were at the bar with us. One of them… Fuck, he was just a kid. But he ripped him apart. If I hadn’t shot him he’d have done the same to me. They’d turned him into a weapon.”

He rubbed furiously at his eyes as thought it could somehow erase images that had long ago embedded themselves in his mind. Jensen cursed inwardly. What was it about him that said ‘tell me about your traumatic past’? Surely that was what people like Auzenne were for. Or at least the non-double agent versions, assuming those existed. But then he stopped to think about it and realised that, knowing MacReady, he may well never have told anyone else outside of whatever debrief he’d been required to go through. What was he supposed to say to a story like that, though? ‘I was at Panchaea, and there was so much blood that sometimes I swear not even drowning in the Arctic Ocean was enough to wash it away?’

“That day was hell. For everyone.” he said finally. He recaptured MacReady’s hand and started on the bandages.

“What did you see? What was it that drove all those people mad?” MacReady didn’t sound accusing. Just sad. Maybe a little desperate, even. It was clearly something that had been bothering him for awhile.

Jensen shook his head and sighed. Whatever answers MacReady wanted, he didn’t have them. “I saw a lot of innocent people lose it and turn on each other. Not everyone…not all augmented people were affected. But those who were? I doubt whatever they saw could’ve been worse than what the rest of us had to go through. They just don’t have to remember it.”

It had never consciously occurred to him that he almost envied those who’d been affected by Darrow’s signal. Sure they had to live with the knowledge of that they’d done, but it was second hand knowledge. Reported to them after they’d recovered their senses by the unfortunate bastards who’d been in their right minds through it all and now had to spend the rest of their lives remembering a reality more horrible than any sensationalised version Picus could spin.

Almost as soon as the thought occurred to him he shoved it to the back of his mind where it would undoubtedly join the million others gnawing away at him. He suspected MacReady would do the same if he remembered any of this tomorrow.

“Go get yourself cleaned up. Aria will be pissed if you get some dead thug’s blood all over the sheets.” He applied the last of the bandages and held out his hand, which MacReady surprisingly took to steady himself as he rose from the sofa. Poor guy was in for a hell of a morning if the comedown was already hitting him this hard.

While MacReady showered Jensen completed his rifling of the apartment by pawing through the kitchen. He found bread and Marmite and set about making toast, all the while wondering why the hell he was being so domestic. It was that stupid caring about other people thing, he supposed. Such a troublesome habit, and one which the world had done its best to break him of with limited success.

MacReady reappeared a few minutes later in a hoodie and sweatpants. It was actually a pretty good look on him. Despite his pretensions of Bond-ness he typically looked almost as out of place in a suit as he did stuck in the office that required him to wear one. Jensen handed him the toast and a glass of water.

“Eat this, drink that, take some aspirin, and maybe you’ll make it to work in time to avoid having my report be the only version of tonight’s mission that Miller sees. Though I’m pretty sure you won’t remember enough of it to take all the credit regardless.”

“The credit for not getting any useful intel? Nah, that’s all you, mate.” He retreated to the sofa and set into the toast. By this point food was the last thing he wanted, but he’d done this more than often enough to know what was good for him. Plus it was sweet of Jensen to have bothered. Not that he would ever admit that. Or even admit that ‘sweet’ was something he had a concept of. Ever since that incident with Auzenne Aria had shown a troubling interest in the idea of him and Jensen together. The slightest indication that the two of them were capable of treating each other like human beings outside of business hours was sure to have her angling for a threesome.

When he looked back toward the kitchen he caught Jensen attempting to stuff what appeared to be an entire box of granola bars into his pocket. “What the hell is it with you and other people’s food?” he demanded, pitching a cushion at his head. “Did Sarif splice in some raccoon genes along with all the tech?”  

Jensen dodged easily and made a break for the door. “Goodnight, MacReady! Enjoy your hangover!” he called over his shoulder as another cushion bounced off the door behind him.  

MacReady sunk back against the remaining sofa cushions and shook his head in bewilderment. As strange missions went this had been one for the record books.

**Author's Note:**

> On a random note, the door unlocking chip I gave MacReady is actually a thing you can buy, and no Neuropozyne is required. I’m totally getting one. Also, Marmite on toast is the universe's gift to hungover people. You should try it sometime should the need arise.


End file.
